I am completely new to this program(and probably in way over my head). I recently started taking pictures for people. I purchased the Adobe Photoshop/Lightroom program and have been using the Lightroom program to edit my pictures for the past year. I am confused as to what the difference is between Lightroom and Photoshop. As I said, I am a beginner at this and hope this isn't a stupid question! I thought when I purchased the program I had access to Photoshop and lightroom but I can't figure out how to get into Photoshop. I have an icon on my desktop for Lightroom but nothing for Photoshop. If you can help me out I would really appreciate it! Thank you!

The names are part of the confusion. One program is Adobe Photoshop (which is usually called Photoshop) and the other program officially is Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (note the similarity of the names — but most people call it just Lightroom), and these are different programs, and to make matters more confusing, sometimes you buy them bundled together, sometimes not.

So, if you want to know how to access Adobe Photoshop, we'd need to know exactly what you purchased. If you paid the one-time only fee, you probably have purchased Lightroom and not Photoshop. If you have purchased the monthly subscription, you have both programs, and you can access Photoshop via the Adobe Creative Cloud application.

Lightroom is a workflow tool, it contains a library module to help you organize your photos, an editor, and methods to distribute your photos (export, web, print, books, slideshow). Photoshop is entirely an editor, and gives you a lot more powerful editing capabilities than Lightroom (although Lightroom has plenty of editing capabilites).

Photoshop and Lightroom are friends, not enemies. Lightroom can handle the majority of editing, helping to create a streamlined workflow. Then, when retouching is needed, Photoshop steps in and finishes the job.

There is no winner. Just two powerful programs that are equally well-suited for different tasks!

Lightroom is a non-destructive image editor that saves edits as text to a catalog.

When you export, the edits are applied to a new version of the file, leaving the original untouched.

Photoshop is basically a destructive editor, in that it changes the pixels of the originals.

It can also edit non-destructively with the Camera Raw plugin (which is hard coded into Lightroom), but the interface is more awkward to use, and Lightroom users typically use Photoshop for pixel editing.